Amazon has a new approach to a true "private cloud" that allows businesses to …

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Amazon has announced Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), a new service that allows Enterprise customers to connect to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services through a VPN. Translating all these acronyms, this is Amazon's attempt to get a bigger foot into Enterprise by extending a more secure connection for moving data.

In a post on the Amazon Web Services Blog, the company offers some typical cloud use scenarios like quick disaster recovery or setting up short-term experiments and leaving them running if successful. While describing the VPC setup process, Amazon also emphasizes the security and control that using a VPN will provide when connecting to its EC2 computing services. You can create your VPC and define a private block of IPs and subnets for it, and all Internet-bound traffic created by your VPC's EC2 instance will route through the VPN. Like other AWSes, Amazon offers VPC on an hourly, pay-as-you go basis.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels further discusses the advantages of VPC and what he says are the limits of other cloud services in his own blog post. Vogels simultaneously calls EC2 "truly disruptive technology" on what is its 3rd anniversary, while admitting that this is "Day One." He argues that VPC is a better answer to what CIOs tell Amazon they need, boldly stating that "I don't think of [current private cloud services] as true clouds." Elasticity is one of the most important aspects of a true cloud service, Vogels says, discounting private clouds that still require the capital expense of an IT infrastructure. He touts VPC's approach that combines that on-demand scalability with VPN security and integration with existing infrastructures.

As ReadWriteEnterprise notes, Amazon has created a "hybrid cloud" with VPC, thanks to its compliance with Enterprise management practices and use of standard encryption methods. This could be the right formula to compete with efforts from Microsoft and IBM for enticing more businesses into the cloud.